Participated · Series A · Dec 2019

Weav Music develops proprietary adaptive music technology that personalizes playback by changing tempo, intensity, structure, and crossfades in real time while preserving audio quality and artistic integrity. The company’s technology is currently available via its award-winning Weav Run app and through licensing deals with major and indie labels to produce adaptive tracks by top artists. Co-founded in 2015 by Lars Rasmussen and Elomida Visviki, Weav is positioning its platform for applications across fitness, sports, dance, gaming, AR/VR, and broader health and wellness use cases. The new capital will be used to expand the adaptive music platform beyond fitness, grow its library and partnerships, and scale adaptive music production using deep learning. Weav plans to make a new adaptive music platform available to fitness-technology partners in 2020. The company aims to broaden commercial adoption throughout the health and wellness industry and other experiential markets.

Led · Seed · Dec 2017

Safe Group has built a mobile app that imports and verifies users' STD test results and displays dates since last tests. The app is integrated with a physician network that can order tests covered by insurance and with diagnostics partners to upload results automatically. Safe built a physician-owned healthcare company, Safe Health, to provide licensed physicians across all 50 states and to satisfy insurance requirements via a tele-medical consult. The company has partnered with Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp so users can import tests from any provider and get tested with or without insurance. Insured users pay only a co-pay after a short questionnaire replaces an in-person consult; uninsured users pay $99 for testing. Safe plans to publicly launch at the Sundance Film Festival next year, is enrolling a beta test, and aims to expand from sexual health into treatment, an online pharmacy, fertility and erectile-dysfunction services over time.

Participated · Equity · Jul 2017

Dote is a mobile shopping startup that set out to create a native mobile checkout experience across many stores and surface social recommendations. Over time the app leaned into influencer recommendations, which are now central to its product. The company introduced Shopping Party, a live-streamed feature that lets influencers share live video while browsing products on Dote and chat with fans. Shopping Party leverages Apple's ReplayKit 2 to deliver two simultaneous streams (phone camera and the Dote app) alongside live chat; the company says the average party lasts about 15 minutes. Dote plans to host two Shopping Parties every hour from 6am to 10am Pacific time for the next two weeks, and some events will be sponsored by brands. Founder and CEO Lauren Farleigh, formerly a product manager at Pocket Gems, said the feature aims to recreate the shared mall-shopping experience on mobile; financially, Dote announced a $12M funding round and has now raised a total of $23M. Dote operates a free mobile shopping app that curates brands like Sephora, Victoria’s Secret and Gap into what it calls a virtual mall. Users pick favorite brands to receive sale notifications and view curated trends, and a social component lets them show friends what they’re buying. The company targets millennial and Gen Z women, particularly ages 15–35, and positions shopping as an entertainment experience on smartphones. Dote says the average user returns 15 times per month and that its algorithms use engagement data to predict purchases. The company takes an undisclosed share of transaction revenue when products sell through the app. Dote will use the new funding for hiring at its San Francisco headquarters and to expand retail partnerships; total funding now stands at $10.8 million.

Participated · Seed · Oct 2016

Ritual is a direct-to-consumer, subscription-based company that sells women's daily and prenatal vitamins for $30 per month. Since its 2015 founding the Los Angeles-based startup has sold one million bottles. The company emphasizes ingredient transparency, citing scientific studies and detailed ingredient pages to distinguish its formulation. Ritual credits a social-media-driven strategy for building a cult following and direct customer touchpoints on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. The business has expanded its management team, hiring a Harvard-trained chief scientific officer, Nima Alamdari, and a director of scientific and clinic affairs. Ritual plans to launch postnatal and post-menopausal vitamins in 2019 as part of a roadmap to be the single vitamin a woman needs. Ritual sells a subscription 30-day supply of vitamins formulated for women at $30 per month. The company is backed by an in-house team of scientists and a medical advisory board and open-sources its ingredient sourcing. Ritual says it includes only the supplements it believes are missing from a Standard American Diet and leaves out nutrients commonly found in foods. The startup plans to use new funding to attract talent, scale the business and build in-house technology to improve customer experience and support. Ritual launched as a Disrupt NY Battlefield 2016 contestant and has accumulated outside investor interest since its debut. The company has raised a total of $15.3 million to date. Ritual launched its online subscription ordering for a 30-day supply of women's vitamins, taken two a day. The product emphasizes 'open-source' data on ingredient provenance and a patent-pending beaded oil capsule for sustained nutrient release. Its formula includes nutrients women commonly need (D, E, K2 MK7, folate, B12, iron, magnesium, boron, DHA/EPA) while omitting vitamins abundant in the Standard American Diet. The company positions itself as building a brand around simplicity, capability and fair price. Founder Kat Schneider presented the concept at TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield prior to launch. The startup noted that a majority of its investors are women. Ritual makes a beaded oil-capsule multivitamin formulated for sustained release and built from transparently sourced ingredients. CEO Katerina Schneider sources ingredients worldwide (for example, folate from Italy) and publishes ingredient research online. The formula omits vitamin C and calcium and includes vitamin K, magnesium and boron to aid calcium absorption, per the company. Ritual sells a 30-day supply direct-to-consumer for $30 per month and launched onstage at Disrupt NY. The startup positions itself within an $80 billion vitamin market where roughly half of Americans take a multivitamin. Ritual plans to expand beyond vitamins into other natural, research-based products such as deodorant and toothpaste.

Participated · Seed · Jan 2016

Ice.com operates a jewelry-specific online marketplace that targets the middle of the market (items around the $100 price point) and vets sellers via on-staff gemologists who order samples and perform random tests. The site negotiates vendor pricing and crawls other retailers to enforce a required discount from competitive market prices. Today the marketplace lists over 100,000 SKUs with plans to expand to 350,000–500,000 by year end. The company has built a custom, responsive platform (launched in Q4 2015) and recently introduced a VIP subscription program (currently $12.99/month) offering close-to-cost pricing and other member benefits. Ice.com is also developing an education database to be linked to product pages to help consumers understand terminology and determine fair prices; that feature was expected to launch in about three months. The business is led by chairman Justin Yoshimura and CEO Brandon Proctor and operates from Austin.